Almost Transparent Blue

I've read this twice, the first time when I was younger than the protagonist and the second time when I was older (both times, /- 1 year). I love this book, but it nauseates me. Part of why it's so intriguing is that it conflates desire and nausea, the things that should be gross with the things that should be beautiful, and you're never sure quite where you stand. The writing is excellent and dense; it feels like much longer than 126 short pages.

Utopie, distopie, fantasy, sì, come no. Ma... la realtà può essere molto peggio. E Murakami ce la fa vedere (sempre che la si voglia vedere: questo non è il Giappone un po' da cartolina di certi GODIBILISSIMI classici).
Io sono impressionabile, ho dovuto leggere questo libricino molto velocemente (rallentavo solo quando Ryu dava segni di umanità).
Mi piacerebbe potere dire che per ragazzi come questi provo solo compassione. In realtà più forte della compassione è la paura del VUOTO PNEUMATICO che hanno dentro e che si scagliano gli uni addosso agli altri con INDIFFERENZA.

[I've seen the future, brother: it is murder (libera associazione di pensiero, niente di più)]

PS: - Mi sa che ora dovrò leggere qualcosa di molto delicato e show more sentimentale per riprendermi... - show less

A hard-shelled insect was knocked off the trunk of a poplar by the wind-blown rain; upside down in flowing water, it tried to swim. I wondered if that beetle had a nest to go back to. Its black body, glistening in the light, could at first be mistaken for a piece of glass. The beetle managed to climb up on a rock and decided which way to go. Perhaps thinking itself safe, it climbed down on a clump of grass, but this was immediately mowed down by a rivulet of flowing rainwater and the insect was swallowed up.

I'll be quite honest with you. There are about twenty pages smack in the middle of this thing about a mescaline trip that are transcendently lyrical and beautiful. I am so tempted to bump up the rating! But that beauty never goes show more anywhere. If you're going to make me slog through the other hundred pages of puke, ugly drug use, puke, ugly sex (some rape?), puke, two onscreen beatings, puke, divining the meaning of life in the entrails of several smashed bugs, puke, a burning death, puke, and a graphic description of eating a piece of very spoiled chicken resulting in some kind of nervous breakdown, I really need it to end in something more substantial than the blackbird singing in the dead of night. I can listen to the Beatles myself with a lot less vomit going on, is what I'm saying. show less

The storytelling was indeed ‘violent’, in so many different ways and levels. On one end of the spectrum, the things that were happening within the story were violent. Sex and drugs, even when they are by themselves, are rarely subtle. But when huge quantities of both are mixed together within a single bowl, the result is an overdosage of violence.

But as if that wasn’t enough, even the prose was violent. Just reading the book itself, I felt like I was being pushed and shoved in all directions. Sometimes I felt suffocated, and there were moments when I felt like my whole body was slammed against a wall.

There are still so many aspects of this book that I do not understand. But rare is a book that repels and intrigues me at the same time.

I read this within 24 hours. This aloof coming of age novel could be devoured in a sitting. A counter-culture piano player who is endeared by everyone he comes across screws and snorts and shoots up in a wasteland of post-Vietnam Japan. I'm a fan of the japanese coming of age story but here, Ryu plays an interesting trick on the genre. Maintaining the sheepish detached 'tragic hero' who is constantly in the middle of horror he splices it with a jaded sense of withdrawal. The third part of this jaunt has a Sanshiro by Soseki feel more than the other bits of degradation and quietism. Clearly to be enjoyed by self-proclaiming existentialists.

This is not a novel in the normal sense. It does not have a beginning, a middle and an end. It just begins and goes on. It is more of a diary of a period in the authors life. The fact that it is pretty much graphic scenes of sex and degradation and not much else is kinda neither here nor there.

It captures the period of nihilistic obsession that can occupy and person or group of people. It is not literary or post-mdern or anything really other than a full account of a person's life for a fixed period of time.

I don't know if it offers a view into Japanese culture or just a youthful subculture. I don’t know if I enjoyed it as I don’t think it falls into the category of a book that can be enjoyed. I am glad I read it.

Mishima-esque nihilism, utilizing ugliness instead of beauty, swirled with pseudo-Bataillean transgression. The language and imagery of this book is equivalent to a clogged garbage disposal in a filthy sink, and Murakami somehow makes it almost beautiful. Plotless, meandering, and at times so disturbing that it is difficult to go on reading. Definitely of interest to readers of contemporary Japanese Literature. Quite similar thematically to a more recent work by Hitomi Kanehara, entitled Snakes and Earrings.